An informal email group discussion following the much trumped about triumph at Jantar Mantar of the Cockroach Brigade’s street-side heroics against NEET
Below is reproduced a very spirited discussion on the subject of IndianEducationsystem that I had with a small group of very eminent and enlightened friends in an informal email-group whose membership is pan India and Transnational.
The flurry of email discussion was triggered by recent blogpost that I uploaded here a few days ago. https://mksudarshans.blog/2026/07/26/a-movement-of-youthful-india-or-is-it-urban-naxalism-2026-model/ . It was my own commentary on the Jantar Mantar agitations staged last week outside Indian Parliament in New Delhi and which compelled the Union Education Minister to resign from the Prime Minister Modi’s Cabinet.
In the discussions, I was not referring to syllabi … neither of the adhyaatmika nor vyavaharika sort … neither the vaideeka nor the loukeeka variety of learning and academic pursuit . The discussion that I tried to steer was towards the basic philosophic approach to structuring the India Education system : in terms of funding it, institutionalising it , managing it and administering it . The corporate model of Education is failing everywhere in the world … Even Ivy League universities in the USA like Harvard and Stanford or UCLA or Oxford are today no longer the centres of academic excellence that they once were .
Our education system thus badly needs to de-corporatise itself and become instead more Indianised : community based , reoriented methods of teaching that puts the acharya-sishya sambhandham or relationship right at the top of all other priorities . Today it’s Profit that is at the top of Academia’s wish list , not genuine development of young minds . To compile a modern state of the art university graduate study syllabi can be anything and is easy … but how it gets imparted is the real challenge .
The Discussions below are mostly from the standpoint of Policy making and implementation. My own views offered therein were a little philosophical.
The best way to read the discussion trail below ⬇️ would be to scroll right down to the end, start from down under and read in succession all the emails as they appear in an upward spiral all the way to the top.
Do post your own views on the discussions and the subject in the Comments section.
M K Sudarshan
****************************
Acharya Devo Bhava
Me to M. R. Sivaraman :
Sivaraman Sir,
You may not understand what I wrote but AI Gemini does accurately recognise what I’m talking about and why !! Please read its response below as reproduced verbatim:
Your reflection captures a profound and painful paradox in modern Indian education. You are highlighting how the shift from education as a spiritual mission (Vidya) to education as a commercial commodity has fundamentally broken the system.
Here is an analysis of how and why this transition happened, and why bemoaning the loss of the “Temple of Learning” is a natural response to this structural collapse.
How the Transformation Happened
Industrialization of Schooling: Education shifted from the Gurukul or community-supported model to a corporate factory model. Schools and colleges are now run as commercial enterprises that prioritize return on investment (ROI) over human development.
Commoditization of Teachers: Teachers are no longer revered guides (Acharyas); they are treated as hourly labor or cost centers on a financial balance sheet. Their performance is often judged by administrative compliance rather than inspiring minds.
Bricks over Brains: Capital is aggressively poured into “bricks and mortar”—luxury campuses, air-conditioned classrooms, and high-tech marketing—while the actual human drivers of education (teachers’ salaries and well-being) are severely underfunded.
Credentials as Products: Students and parents have been conditioned to behave as consumers. They do not buy “learning”; they buy certificates, degrees, and placement guarantees to survive in a hyper-competitive job market.
Why the Demand-Supply Curve is Broken
You rightly pointed out that the “Price Point” for committed teachers is out of sync. In a pure market economy, high demand and low supply should drive up the value of a resource. However, in education, this fails because:
Asymmetric Valuation: The market is willing to pay exorbitant fees for infrastructure and brand names, but institutional owners pocket the surplus rather than passing it to the teaching faculty.
The “Grist for the Mill” Phenonmenon: Because teachers are treated as replaceable parts, institutions optimize for the lowest possible wage that can sustain basic operations. This drives highly capable, deeply committed individuals away from the profession entirely.
Why We Continue to Bemoan the Loss
We mourn the loss of the Vidyaalaya because humans inherently recognize that true learning cannot survive in a transactional ecosystem.
We cry foul because the cultural memory of “Acharya Devo Bhava” (Revere the Teacher as God) still exists in our DNA, creating a painful cognitive dissonance when contrasted with modern reality. You cannot build a “Temple of Learning” using the blueprints of a corporate marketplace. When education is reduced to a transaction, inspiration is replaced by compliance, and wisdom is replaced by mere data.
Sudarshan
Sent from my iPhone
On 28 Jul 2026, at 9:52 AM, sudarshan madabushi <> wrote:
Sir, I’m in full agreement with your views. 🙏👌
It’s just that we are speaking at two different levels .
You speak like the practical and competent IAS administrator and civil servant that you are. While I’m only lamenting ( in Tamil “polambal”) like a cynical 2-penny philosopher.
🙏
Sudarshan
Sent from my iPhone
On 28 Jul 2026, at 9:32 AM, Madras Sivaraman <> wrote:
I am not able to understand you sir.
Given the contemporary situation recruitment of teachers and doctors have priority over every freebie by govt.
In India, historically, Teaching was not a reeprofession … it was always a mission in life for men women who undertook it as a Dharmic duty, labour of love and a commitment that expected virtually no remuneration at all other than societal support for a reasonable , sustainable decent standard of living . No more , no less.
Such a lofty historical tradition cannot even be imagined in the modern times where everything is based on a “business model” of Demand and Supply dynamics.
The aggregate Demand for schools, colleges and universities is so huge but then it’s all understood only in terms of bricks and mortar.
The Supply of committed Teachers is however very limited mainly because the Price Point on the Demand-Supply Curve is out of synch with the curve behaviours. Why ? Because Teachers too are relegated to being mere transactable material resources — i.e. no more than bricks and mortars that must be sourced, procured and utilised/exploited as so much grist or fodder for that great big machinery called Education, in the most profitable manner possible, by what one may call “educational entrepreneur” or “captains of the education industry”.
There is this Upanishad “vaakya” that elevates Teachers to godhood : “acarya Devo bhava” … In India today we have reduced Education to a being a bit-player in the Marketplace of commerce. How and Why should we then go on bemoaning the impossibility of turning it into a Temple of Learning, a Vidyaalaya?
Sudarshan
Sent from my iPhone
On 28 Jul 2026, at 7:07 AM, Madras Sivaraman <> wrote:
I am surprised that, much like our elected representatives, no one seems to have noticed the most significant flaw in our educational system that I previously highlighted.
There is a critical shortage of hundreds of thousands of teachers across the academic spectrum, including at premier institutions like the IITs, IIMs, and AIIMS. Correcting the examination system achieves very little if there are no teachers to instruct the students.
Furthermore, the Prime Minister’s appointment of Nandan Nilekani as Chairman appears to be a political move, given that he previously contested and lost an election on a Congress ticket against the BJP in Bangalore.
We are already aware of the ongoing issues with Aadhaar cards, where hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals hold the same documentation without any clear distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Regards
Sivaraman
On Tue, 28 Jul 2026, 03:15 Ramamurthi Swaminathan, <@gmail.com> wrote:
You are taking me back to 1971. MuKa won the elections with a massive mandate. He called me – I was Deputy Secretary, Budget in the Finance Department – and asked me to make a budget provision for a new scheme. He wanted to open 108 government colleges. There were 108 taluks those days. At the rate of 36 each year, to be completed over a three year period. And all of them were arts colleges with Tamil, History and Geography as the core subjects. He knew Science courses would need more investment. I told him politely that it would only result in producing more unemployable graduates. He responded angrily: நீங்க MA பட்டம் வாங்கிட்டீங்க. IAS அதிகாரி ஆயிட்டீங்க. எல்லாத்துக்கும் மேலாக நீங்க Brahmins. எங்களோட ஆவல், எதிர்பார்ப்பு எல்லாம் உங்களுக்கு புரியாது. மேற்கொண்டு பேசாதீங்க.
Sivaraman wrote:
NEET FAILURES ARE NOTHING COMPARED TO THE OTHER MASSIVE HOLES IN THE SYSTEM. Teachers vacancies in thousands even IN GOI INSTITUTIONS LIKE IIMS, IITS, AIIMS and so on . Poorly equipped labs. No proper toilets. Half a million posts of teachers posts in schools vacant with judiciary interfering at every stage of recruitment. Despite very substantial salaries very poor quality of teachers in many schools. Teachers shown against schools but they are working in home towns.
On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 3:36 AM sudarshan madabushi <> wrote:
The Jantar Mantar protest is over. India’s real youth crisis isn’t.
The protest ended, but the graduate glut fuelling it hasn’t.
The Cockroach Janta Party has now called off its 36-day agitation at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, after the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Now that the protest is over, it’s worth asking what it really achieved, and what deeper problems it leaves behind untouched.
When the CJP protest started there was widespread support for the agenda at least, if not the party itself. National Testing Agency had let lakhs of NEET UG aspirants down once again. This was not the NTA’s first failure either. Students who had spent years preparing, watched their effort devalued by administrative failure.
That the government moved with unusual speed in detecting the leak, cancelling and re-conducting the exam, ordering an investigation, arresting those responsible, and announcing a shift toward computer-based testing, was a good redressal but a lot of questions remained.
Can India build an exam infrastructure that is fool-proof at the scale of 20 lakh candidates?
Should so much of a young person’s future hinge on a single exam taken on a single day?
Does Indian higher education have the quality-assurance mechanisms to match the intensity of domestic competitions?
How long would it take for Indian institutions to match up to the global education standards?
There are several other pressing concerns afflicting higher education, including the issuance of fraudulent degrees, the appointment of lecturers on the strength of such forged qualifications, and widespread irregularities and corruption in the recruitment of teaching staff. There have been cases where the authenticity of the degrees of Vice Chancellors themselves has been questioned.
Although many of these systemic deficiencies predate the tenure of the present government, it is the incumbent administration that bears the responsibility of addressing them and restoring integrity to the higher education system. These are concerns any functioning democracy should be able to debate without the debate itself becoming a battlefield. And so, there was a rationale for the protesters to continue with a meaningful demonstration even after ReNEET results had been declared.
That, however, is not quite what happened. Over the weeks the protest visibly widened out into something more diffuse. It became a stage to peddle the by now familiar, far-Left agenda.
Placards and slogans invoking “Brahminwad” sat alongside “Azadi” style chants that have, in Indian protest history, carried far more freight than a simple demand for accountability.
Comedian Kunal Kamra’s remarks about Bhagwan Ram during this period drew wide condemnation for crossing the boundaries of political satire and going into hurtful religious mockery. Placards stating “India needs Nepal type treatment” and references to Bangladesh’s 2024 unrest betrayed an intent to incite violence rather than a demand for exam reforms.
Ignoring the highly hurtful references to idol worship and non-believer Hindus in Faiz’s poem, a lady sang “Hum Dekhenge” with an animated emphasis on “Bas naam rahega Allah ka” as if it were an Aarti at a pandal, unaware that the very line she was singing prophesied her own community’s extinction.
The most consequential shift was signalled by Yogendra Yadav, who has been present at nearly every major anti-government mobilisation of the past decade. His advocacy of a “politics of resistance” has always been a thinly veiled call for organised street mobilisation, to foment an insurrection aimed at overthrowing a democratically elected government through sustained and violent agitation. This time he was direct. He said “Now democracy will run not from Parliament, but from the streets.”
The presence of Islamists like SIMI founder Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Vice President Prof. Salim Engineer and Mahmood Paracha, lawyer known for defending high-profile terror cases and organizing firearm license workshops, at protest venues, and a flood of vulgar and abusive content on social media riding the protest’s coattails, further diluted the integrity of the protests.
All of this raises a larger question — namely, why is India’s educated youth such fertile ground for this kind of mobilisation in the first place? The honest answer runs through political economy, not conspiracies.
Educated but underemployed youth has been combustible material for radical politics for as long as mass education has existed, without mass employment to match it.
The pattern recurs throughout history with striking consistency. In late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century Russia, it was Raznochintsy, the educated but socially unanchored sons of clergy, minor officials, and impoverished gentry who could not find a place in the Czarist order, who filled the ranks of the Narodnik movement and, later, the Bolshevik cadres.
Lenin himself built his organisational theory in his pamphlet titled “What Is To Be Done?” around the idea that revolutionary consciousness had to be supplied by an educated vanguard to a working class that would not arrive at it on its own.
In 1960s and 70s India, the Naxalite movement drew heavily on graduates from Presidency College and Jadavpur University in Calcutta. To these young men who had degrees but no clear economic future, Charu Mazumdar’s call to “annihilate class enemies” offered both an ideology and an identity and a purpose that the labour market had failed to provide.
Peru’s “Shining Path” was founded and led by Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor, and drew its early cadre disproportionately from provincial university students who had earned degrees that the Peruvian economy had no use for.
Iran’s 1979 revolution, though not Communist in its outcome, was propelled in its crucial early phase by a highly educated, underemployed urban youth that the Shah’s economy could not absorb fast enough.
A similar lesson can be drawn from Chinese history. Abolishing the Imperial exams in 1905 shut off the traditional path to a government career for China’s educated elite. There was little to replace it once the Republic descended into warlord chaos. That frustrated, qualified, jobless generation drove the May Fourth Movement in 1919, and within two years produced the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, many of whom, including Mao, were underemployed teachers, clerks, and librarians, not peasants.
In each case the ideology varied, but the recruiting pool was structurally identical- young people with credentials but without correspondingly available livelihoods; young people who had time, grievance, and often genuine intellectual seriousness to spare.
Revolutionary movements know this and have always organised around Universities rather than factories precisely because campuses concentrate this particular combination of resentment and leisure more efficiently than almost any other institution.
Across a century and five countries, one recruiting pool: educated youth with degrees but no livelihoods to match.
India’s version of this dynamic does not require the presence of an organised Communist party to function, though where such influence exists it certainly accelerates things. Instead, what India has at scale, is something arguably more structurally entrenched.
India has a higher-education system that keeps producing graduates whose degrees carry little to no relationship with employable skill, taught in a number of cases by faculty for whom activism has become an extension of the classroom. Some University departments, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences at institutions like JNU and parts of Delhi University, have long had a section of the faculty whose public commentary reads less as scholarship than as advocacy. Their presence and vocal support at protest sites blur the line between teaching students and recruiting them into agenda-driven political projects.
In short, we in India are not waiting for Revolutionaries to scout unemployed youth, we are, in fact, producing so called educated but unemployable youth and placing them directly in the hands of Leftist activist faculty.
Even if the problem of ideological influence is set aside, a much larger and more fundamental problem remains. A huge crisis lies in India’s vast network of Tier II and Tier III colleges. Far removed from institutions like JNU and Jadavpur that dominate media attention, these lesser-known colleges educate the overwhelming majority of the country’s students.
They produce large numbers of B.A. and M.A. graduates in subjects and at a quality level that the job market does not value, because many courses are designed around what colleges can offer at low cost rather than the skills the economy actually needs. As a result, the degree itself becomes the product being sold, while the knowledge and skills a college is supposed to impart often take a back seat.
This Bazarification of education creates, in turn, a self-defeating mindset among many graduates. They earn a degree that gives them a sense of social status but does not improve their chances of finding a good job. As a result, many graduates with a general B.A. are unwilling to consider well-paying and secure vocational or “grey-collar” occupations such as electricians, technicians, skilled machinists, or hospitality supervisors.
The degree often leads them to believe that such work is beneath their status, even though these professions frequently offer better pay, greater job security, and clearer career prospects than the degree itself.
Meanwhile, government jobs retain an almost mythic pull, not simply for the disproportionately high remuneration enjoyed by a small minority of government employees, compared with the earnings of the vast masses in the private sector but for the security, and the informal opportunities for rent-seeking that persist despite reform efforts. There is also a near-total insulation from being fired regardless of performance.
It is difficult to overstate how much this compensation structure distorts career choices for an entire generation, pulling talent toward exam-cramming for a shrinking number of government vacancies rather than towards building something meaningful.
Adding to the problem is a distorted sense of entitlement among many graduates who believe that simply earning a degree gives them the right to a government job or another white-collar job. This is a mistaken belief but the view is surprisingly being subscribed to by an increasingly large number of youngsters, largely because of the nanny-state mindset that has taken root in public discourse, where the refrain that “the government is not providing jobs” is repeated so often that it hardens into belief.
This framing is erroneous, but its constant repetition has made it feel like common sense to many. No modern economy, whether state-controlled or market-driven, can guarantee a white-collar job to every graduate.
The government’s responsibility is different. It should create the conditions in which businesses can grow and generate large numbers of jobs. This requires good infrastructure, sensible regulations, access to finance, and a business-friendly environment. At the same time, the education system must ensure that the degrees it awards equip students with the knowledge and skills that employers actually need.
The protest saw its share of abuse, filth, and even calls to violence, and the state would be right to act firmly where the law was broken. But the point here was never to dismiss the protest itself, silence genuine criticism, or paint every angry graduate as a revolutionary in the making. That would be mistaking a symptom for the disease. The real task now is to treat the underlying economic pathology seriously, because a grievance industry needs a grievance to run on, and India is still manufacturing that grievance in bulk, protest or no protest.
Some fixes are structural and slow but essential. These include tightening accreditation so that colleges functioning as little more than certificate issuing businesses lose the license to operate, expanding vocational and polytechnic pathways so they carry the same social respectability as a University degree rather than being seen as a fallback for those who “couldn’t get in” elsewhere, and steadily rebalancing the enormous gap between public and private-sector compensation as well as job security so that talented graduates are not incentivised to spend years of their most productive life preparing for a government exam instead of building something useful.
The exam leak was contained quickly; the structural failures behind the anger remain untouched.
Some reforms are about removing barriers, and not imposing new restrictions. India’s ease-of-doing-business rankings have improved over the past decade. Yet, starting and growing a small business, the kind that can absorb large numbers of youth, remains harder than it should be. Many competing economies make this process much easier. Every unnecessary hurdle that is removed gives young people one more reason to build a business instead of waiting for a government job.
Coaching as commerce, and the paper-leak mafia that runs alongside it, will not recede through moral appeals; it will recede only when the stakes attached to any single exam come down. Multiple attempts through the year, modular or on-demand testing, and admissions criteria that weigh more than one score would all drain the anxiety that this industry depends on.
Alongside this, stiff, swiftly-enforced criminal penalties for paper leaks, of the kind now awaiting Parliament’s approval, are necessary to make the mafia’s business too risky to run.
The paper leak that triggered this crisis was a genuine failure. The government’s efforts to contain the fallout have addressed the immediate problem. The deeper problems concerning the Education sector and their utility aspects still remain. A generation of youngsters has earned degrees for jobs that do not exist. Their future depends on a handful of high-stakes examinations. In some places, these youngsters are taught by people more interested in mobilising them than educating them.
As long as these conditions persist, there will always be a fresh pool of frustrated youth ready to be exploited, regardless of which government is in power or which examination suffers the next paper leak
On 27 Jul 2026, at 11:17 AM, Ramani Hariharan <> wrote:
Thank you Sudarshanji for eloquently putting across your perspectives.
Expecting the govt and political parties on both sides of parliament to objectively analyse the issues before they take a stand in a democracy is too ambitious.
We should be happy if they allow parliament to discuss the issues & bring a closure to the core issue. That requires maturity of the elected members. By this yardstick, I fear most of the members will fail.
Thank you for introducing the word “ochlocracy”. I was a bit disappointed to learn that in plain English it meant Mob Rule.
1. Modi govt was insensitive to the pulse of the students.
2. But the treasury bench did express willingness to discuss the issue on the floor of the House, but the Opposition refused discussion and made resignation of Minister Pradhan a precondition.
3. The students took to the streets and hooligan behaviour very near the Parliament premises causing security concerns for the deployed police force.
4. The MPs who represented the constituency of the agitating students: what were they doing ? They were derelict in their duty to escalate the issue inside the Parliament , not outside in the streets . They failed democracy, they failed parliament and they failed the students.
5. The Modi govt. has now capitulated to ochlocracy. It’s a very bad precedent that has been set. In future, we can expect more such street hooliganism to assert itself and trump parliamentarianism. Once the mob tastes blood, its thirst for more will only increase.
Bye bye Democracy , Hail ochlocracy!
Sudarshan
Sent from my iPhone
On 26 Jul 2026, at 11:45 PM, Ramamurthi Swaminathan <@gmail.com> wrote:
Both Srinivasa Sastri and Rajaji were right in condemning rabble rousers. But those remarks do not apply to the present agitation. It could have been prevented if the GOI had been sensitive to student grievances and talked to them sympathetically two months ago. Instead, it mulishly refused to meet the students and give a sympathetic hearing to their complaints. It compounded it by refusing to discuss the issue in Parliament. The public square understandably became the protest site. This is precisely how IG created the conditions for the JP movement. I have repeatedly stated that Vajapayee would have handled this issue with greater sensitivity and defused the situation. NaMo must understand, at least now, that arrogance in politics can be self destructive.
